From SFGate.com in California:
It’s night in the rugged hills of northeastern California. A herd of cows, many with young calves at their sides, begin shifting nervously. The October winds have brought news of danger nearby: A lone gray wolf, eyes glowing yellow in the moonlight. Known as OR-103, the young male has gone days, perhaps weeks, without a kill. And he’s hungry.
If you’ve never seen a gray wolf up close, you may be imagining a husky or a large coyote. Instead, think of a mastiff. Males weigh up to 150 pounds, with paw prints the size of human hands and fangs as long as your thumbs. Most American wolves prefer deer and elk, but OR-103 has a crippled front paw, and no way to catch such lightning-quick prey.
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Wolves force California ranchers into deadly compromises
From SFGate.com in California:
It’s night in the rugged hills of northeastern California. A herd of cows, many with young calves at their sides, begin shifting nervously. The October winds have brought news of danger nearby: A lone gray wolf, eyes glowing yellow in the moonlight. Known as OR-103, the young male has gone days, perhaps weeks, without a kill. And he’s hungry.
If you’ve never seen a gray wolf up close, you may be imagining a husky or a large coyote. Instead, think of a mastiff. Males weigh up to 150 pounds, with paw prints the size of human hands and fangs as long as your thumbs. Most American wolves prefer deer and elk, but OR-103 has a crippled front paw, and no way to catch such lightning-quick prey.
Click here for the full story.
For Wolves, the Culture War Is Extremely Deadly
From Rolling Stone:
In February 2021, a black wolf wandered across the border of Yellowstone National Park in Montana. Called 1155, he wore a radio collar that park biologists fit him with three years before. When he left the safety of the park, 1155 was what biologists call a “dispersed male,” leaving his pack to travel alone in search of a mate. As a descendant of wolves reintroduced in 1995 to Yellowstone and Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return wilderness, he was playing out a role in a success story three decades in the making: to ultimately restore wolves to their former range from which they’d been exterminated.
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Chernobyl Was a Wildlife Haven. Then Russian Troops Arrived
From Wired.com:
GERMÁN ORIZAOLA was standing in the shadow of Chernobyl Power Plant’s reactor Number Four—the epicenter of the worst nuclear accident ever.
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As lobo genetic diversity declines, ranchers say male wolf once again killed a cow
From NMPoliticalReport.com:
When Bob Daugherty headed up the canyon behind his house to check on his cows, he said he was not surprised to find two of them dead and to discover they had been killed by wolves.
He knew that a wolf that had allegedly killed livestock in another area was relocated to a private ranch known as Ladder Ranch last summer and his grazing allotment is not far from that property.
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Michigan DNR reacts to wolf attack on training dog in Marquette County
From NBC TV6 in Michigan:
MARQUETTE, Mich. (WLUC) – The Department of Natural Resources is responding to a wolf attack on a dog earlier this week.
The DNR says a man was training his hunting dogs near the Forestville Trailhead Tuesday when it occurred. His dog was baying at a rabbit when a wolf approached and carried the dog further into the woods.
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Wolves as endangered as tigers in India; only 3,100 left
From The Times of India:
DEHRADUN: The first scientific population estimate of Indian peninsular wolves (canis lupus pallipes), known to be more to be more than a million years older than all other wolf species in the world, has revealed that only 3,100 members of the species are left in the country. This makes them almost as endangered as tigers, whose estimated population in the country is around 2,967.
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Killing Wolves to Own the Libs?
From The New Yorker:
The gray wolf prefers to eat fleet ungulates—elk, deer—but when Europeans arrived in America with livestock its menu expanded. A wolf that cannot find its favored meal may turn to cattle and sheep. Livestock producers and big-game hunters have considered wolves an existential threat since Colonial days. In 1634, a tract called “New England’s Prospect,” by William Wood, described the animals as “the greatest inconveniency,” noting that there was “little hope of their utter destruction, the Country being so spacious, and they so numerous.”
Idaho has plenty of cattle and elk, both of which generate a lot of profit: the cattle industry is worth nearly two billion dollars, and the state collects about six million dollars a year in hunting fees—about ninety thousand people hunt elk. Of the Western states, Idaho has long had a reputation as the most hostile toward the gray wolf, a once endangered species; it’s legal to slay pups in their dens there.
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Opposing groups agree Colorado wolf reintroduction likely to miss voter-approved deadline
From the Coloradoan:
Two groups on opposite sides of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction measure agree the deadline to put paws on the ground is in serious jeopardy after last month’s ruling to relist wolves and move management from states like Colorado to the federal government.
Voters narrowly approved Proposition 114 in 2020, mandating the predators be reintroduced west of the Continental Divide no later than the end of 2023.
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Wild population of Mexican wolves grows in size for sixth year
From the United States Fish and Wildlife Service:
The wild population of Mexican wolves in the United States continued to grow in 2021. According to the 2021 annual count, the U.S. population of Mexican wolves has increased by 5 percent since the previous year, raising the total number of wolves in the wild to a minimum of 196 animals. This marks the sixth consecutive year of growth in the wild population.
From November 2021 through February 2022, the Interagency Field Team (IFT) conducted ground and aerial counts of Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. According to the IFT, the population is distributed with 112 wolves in New Mexico and 84 in Arizona. In 2020, the team documented a minimum of 186 wolves. The slower growth in 2021 is attributed to low pup recruitment in the wild population.
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A mysterious email, a scalpel, and a Princeton professor: The search for extinct wolves
From The Daily Princetonian:
There was nothing particularly unusual about Bridgette vonHoldt receiving an email from a man in Texas with pictures of strange-looking, reddish-hued coyotes.
As an associated faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, vonHoldt specializes in the hybridization of canids, a family of mammals that includes dogs, wolves, and coyotes. As a result, she gets a lot of queries from dog owners in her inbox asking her to identify the ancestry or possible wolf heritage of their furry best friends.
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